As a result of failed contract negotiations, Disney pulled New York affiliate ABC7 off of cable company Cablevision’s channel lineup early this morning, leaving more than three million people without a channel to watch the Oscars on tonight unless they tune in over the air.
We’d like to offer those three million people the following online viewing alternatives. These options will also be good extra material for folks who do have the ability to watch on their TVs.
The live video options on this list won’t cover the Oscars ceremonies; they’ll just plug you in to what’s going on on the red carpet and backstage. If you want to follow the awards show itself without turning on the TV, liveblogs are your best option.
As with the other choices on our list here, these can also be supplements to over-the-air, cable or satellite TV viewing. Here are a few to choose from.
The A.V. Club Associated Content Entertainment Weekly Film.com Greencine
We’ve embedded the Associated Press and Livestream’s “AP Live” video widget above. It will show red carpet coverage, and you can use it to track and make Twitter and Facebook updates about the Oscars.
You can also watch AP Live at Livestream, Facebook and AT&T Entertainment.
ABC’s live red carpet show streams stream at Oscar.com from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. PT (6:00 to 8:00 p.m. ET). The stream will be attached to a Facebook discussion engine, and many of the reporters’ questions will be pulled from there.
It’s similar to what CNN did with Facebook for President Obama’s inauguration and the Michael Jackson memorial service.
After the ceremony starts you’ll be given a look backstage, but there won’t be a live stream of the ceremony itself. You might get an even more in-depth experience, though. Oscar.com will host a “Thank You Cam” for award winners who want to say more than they did on stage.
TVGuide’s “fashion cam” will probably be minimalistic but it will be sufficient for seeing all the fantastic clothes the stars will wear as they walk down the red carpet. We’re not able to embed it here because TVGuide hasn’t provided a way to do so yet, but we do have the link to TVGuide’s Oscar video library.
You can also check out TVGuide’s six-part Academy Awards preview video series.
You can use social media to track what’s going on with the Oscars. “Oscars” is already a trending topic even though it’s several hours before the show as we’re writing this.
Just watch the stream for that topic and you’ll definitely hear about each big turn and revelation as it happens. The commentary of the masses should prove interesting too.
[Previous coverage: Oscars Live Video: Watch the Academy Awards Streaming Online]
Update: The issue between ABC and Cablevision been resolved with a tentative deal between the two companies. The ABC affiliate is back on the network for now, but that happened after the Academy Awards had already begun.
Tags: abc, academy awards, backstage, cablevision, disney, live video, livestream, new york, Oscars, oscars-2010, red carpet
Entertainment Weekly reports that Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland drew almost $40 million in box office revenue on Friday, setting the stage for what will likely have been a $100 million (or more) weekend. The film will definitely beat the previous record for this weekend of the year — $70 million, set by 300 in 2006.
The film is notable as Burton’s first major 3D release. Despite the backlash from filmgoing traditionalists, it looks like 3D is drawing audiences. (Also notable: Some scenes were simply filmed in 2D and converted to 3D later, which some argue is not true 3D.)
Last year, James Cameron’s Avatar shattered all previous box office records to become the highest-earning film of all time by earning nearly $2 billion. 3D technology was one of Avatar’s biggest draws. Now Alice’s performance indicates that Avatar’s success wasn’t totally an anomaly for 3D movies.
Both films were also heavily promoted with social media. Avatar’s director and stars appeared in a webcast Q&A hosted by Facebook and MTV. Alice had a similar event which drew 400,000 viewers on MySpace.
Unlike Avatar, Alice has received mostly lukewarm critical responses. We’ll have to keep our ears to the ground to see if the circulation of critics’ negative reviews and mediocre buzz on Twitter, Facebook and blogs cause a big dip in ticket sales next weekend.
Tags: 3D, Alice in Wonderland, box office, disney, Film, Movies, tim burton
The Twittersphere is in love with Justin Bieber. Once again the young pop star tops our top 10 Twitter trends chart, even in spite of the devastating Chile earthquake that also peaked this week as a topic of Twitter conversations.
The fresh data, which comes courtesy of the folks at What The Trend, highlights the most popular topics on Twitter. Hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart given the topical nature of the list.
In looking at the trending data, common themes are starting to emerge and even point to three core audiences – teens, television watchers and movie goers — turning to Twitter to discuss their favorite subject matter.
For example, the Jonas Brothers seem to always be a subject of interest, though certainly not on the same level as Justin Bieber. Could this point to the teen king reigning supreme in the music industry for the year ahead?
Also even though the Olympics have come to a close, the games remained just as much of a hot topic on Twitter with avid discussions around the gold medal hockey game and popular athletes. What’s especially surprising, however, is that another big upcoming television event — The Academy Awards — has yet to capture the attention of the Twitterati on the same scale.
Looking toward the week ahead we expect to see Bieber continue to fair well on the chart, Alice in Wonderland to bump up the chart and the Oscars to hit with Twitter audiences.
You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section as well as read more about this past week’s trends on What The Trend.
Tags: justin bieber, Top Twitter Topics, twitter
The iTunes Store appears to be suffering downtime and other issues today. The service is at best slow, at worst not loading for some and delivering error messages for others.
It’s rare for Apple’s media store — which recently celebrated an amazing 10 billion downloads — to suffer from technical difficulties, but it seems it has fallen foul of some kind of as-yet-unconfirmed issue.
Here at Mashable, we’ve been testing the service and although a search can be carried out successfully (if slowly) trying to click through to specific items returns an error message: “We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (504).”
It seems many Twitter users are having similar problems. Recently tweeted iTunes-themed comments include, “What’s wrong with iTunes today?” and “iTunes Store not working/slow. Anyone having the same problem?”
Are you suffering from iTunes issues? We are keeping an eye on the Apple support page for iTunes and will let you know when we hear more.
Tags: apple, itunes
Cliff Atkinson is author of The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever (New Riders, 2009).
What do you do when you’re giving a presentation, and notice that your audience is looking down, busily typing on their laptops and smartphones? And what about when you get the sense that they are turning against you?
When audiences use Twitter and other tools to communicate with one another during live presentations, they create a new “backchannel” where they share comments, questions and sometimes criticisms about the person speaking.
This new dynamic has led to high-profile blowups between presenters and audiences, which makes it more important than ever for presenters to do the right things to avoid similar disasters.
To short-circuit a possible disaster, keep in mind these five things you can do to prepare and engage the backchannel.
One of the major causes of backchannel disasters is a mismatch between what audiences expect, and what you deliver. Make sure you match your audience expectations when you are planning your material by using Twitter to reach out to the followers who will be in attendance. Ask for their feedback. Query them about challenges they are facing that you can help resolve, case studies of how they tackled situations related to your topic, or suggestions of what you should be sure to cover.
Audience members who use Twitter during a live presentation will often assume the speaker is not paying attention to their comments, so they may be more prone to be snarky or say things they wouldn’t say to you face-to-face. Prevent this dynamic at the outset by publicly welcoming audience members using Twitter and let them know you’ll be monitoring what they write, and possibly reading aloud to the whole audience what they tweet.
The whole point of social media is that people want to get more involved in experiences, rather than be passive recipients of opinions pronounced from on high. To get people more involved, plan your material in a way that allows you to take Twitter breaks.
When you break, switch over to a browser, review the audience tweets and respond to questions both from the backchannel and from the live audience. These breaks give you the chance to take the temperature of the audience, make sure you’re on track, and to make any adjustments to your presentation based on the feedback you get.
When you take a Twitter break and review comments, you may find that audience members made negative remarks or even heckled you. What should you do? You’ll need to make a judgment call here –- if you can’t do anything about the issue, or if it reflects the personal view of that one person, you might just ignore it.
But if the comment is disruptive and you see it’s affecting the comments of others, you may need to address it directly. In that case, read the comment out loud to the audience, and take a poll of how many people agree with the comment. If many people agree, ask the individual to explain it further, and then address it. If only a few people concur, let the commenter know you’ll be glad to talk further after the presentation and move on.
The last thing you want to do is lose control of your presentation because you’re overwhelmed. Trying to deliver your presentation while monitoring the information flowing from the Twitterstream can be difficult. If it’s too much to do both, which is the case for most people, focus on your delivery first, then engage the backchannel when you turn your attention to it during Twitter breaks. That way you accomplish what you came to do –- delivering an effective, memorable presentation as you promised in your session description, as well engaging and involving your audience during breaks.
- How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data - The Science of Building Trust With Social Media - How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement - 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology - How Social Media is Taking the News Local
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Splitcast, Alina555
Tags: backchannel, business, feedback, presentation, presentations, social media, twitter
We’ve already brought you a how-to guide to get started with Spotify (read that first if you don’t know what it is), but now we’re delving a little deeper into the music streaming software with a look at some hints, tips and tricks that will help you get the most of the service.
Have a read below to see eight great ways to make your Spotify experience smoother, both within the service and via third-party services. And, as always, do be sure to let us know in the comments if there are any great Spotify user hints you have to share.
While you’ll likely find tons of music you like by browsing around Spotify’s click-based system, there will be times you want to find a specific track and don’t want to muck around with fuzzy searches or the like. That’s where Spotify’s advanced search options come into their own.
Simple search terms include sticking title:, album: and artist: at the front of a text-based search query to narrow down results to those three fields, but you can further refine searches for an even more targeted result.
If you wanted a quick trip down memory lane, you could search year:1999 to bring up tracks tagged with that particular year. Likewise, you can search a range of years through year:1999-2004. You can follow the same logic to search by genre, so genre:blues will offer you up a vast range of blues tracks in a jiffy.
This gets advanced when you combine those terms to get a smaller list of results, hopefully containing just what it was you were looking for. Say you only like the old Fleetwood Mac. To get songs you know you want to hear, you could type artist:”fleetwood mac” year:1967-1975.
Those of you skilled in the ways of keyboard shortcuts will be pleased to note that Spotify has a ton that will have you control-clicking quickly around the software in no time at all. While some are the same as you’re already used to (e.g cut is control-x or command-x, and paste is the same with v), here are some of the main shortcuts we’ve found useful, for both Windows PCs and Macs.
Play and pause: Spacebar / SpacebarTurn the volume up: Control-Up / Command-UpTurn the volume down: Control-Down / Command-DownMute the audio: Control-Shift-Down / Command-Shift-DownSkip to the next song: Control-Right / Control-Command-RightGo back to the previous song: Control-Left / Control-Command-LeftMake a new playlist: Control-N / Command-NLand on the search box: Control-L / Command-LGo back: Alt-Left / Command-[Go forward: Alt-Right / Command-]Logout (close in a hurry): Control-Shift-W / Command-Shift-W
Play and pause: Spacebar / Spacebar
Turn the volume up: Control-Up / Command-Up
Turn the volume down: Control-Down / Command-Down
Mute the audio: Control-Shift-Down / Command-Shift-Down
Skip to the next song: Control-Right / Control-Command-Right
Go back to the previous song: Control-Left / Control-Command-Left
Make a new playlist: Control-N / Command-N
Land on the search box: Control-L / Command-L
Go back: Alt-Left / Command-[
Go forward: Alt-Right / Command-]
Logout (close in a hurry): Control-Shift-W / Command-Shift-W
Spotify shows a little circular symbol with an arrow below a line when there is more than one version of a particular song. This feature can be useful if you’ve found the right song, but the wrong version.
As an example, say you look up Bob Dylan’s Girl From The North Country but it’s not the version you wanted with Johnny Cash. If you click the symbol, Spotify will display that version too, as well as any others it may have in its database.
This feature is not perfect — it didn’t group Gary Numan’s remastered version of Cars in with the other versions, for example — but is generally a handy way of finding alternative, acoustic, live, or radio edit versions of songs.
This one’s not rocket science, but it is a feature that’s not exactly promoted so we thought it worthy of mention. As with other music software, like iTunes, et al., Spotify can scrobble the music you are playing on Spotify to Last.fm (i.e. send it to your Last.fm profile).
It’s super-simple to enable this link-up. Just go to the edit menu from the top-right menu bar, click preferences, scroll down three or so options and you’ll see a Last.fm box. If you enter your Last.fm username and password and check the “Enable scrobbling to Last.fm” button, it will do just that.
Now, your Last.fm “Recently Listened Tracks” will display your Spotify streams.
If you’ve seen someone tweeting a track, or happened across a Spotify URL that you’re curious about but don’t want to launch the application (or aren’t on a Spotified computer) there’s a site that offers “decoding” of such mysterious URL strings.
Head over to http://spotify.url.fi/ and you’ll see a box to enter the text into. Once you do, the track or album will be revealed to you. It’s a pretty basic site, as you’ll see from the results screen grab above, but it works, and will get you the data you require with minimum fuss.
As well as decoding them, you can also use a tool that will get a little more info out of your Spotify URLs. Instead of the seemingly random string of numbers and letters, Cleanify will take your HTTP link and add the artist’s name and track’s title while preserving the Spotify direct link.
There are a few services that help you shorten the long Spotify URLs so that you can actually get a word in edgewise if you wanted to retweet it, for example.
We think a really neat option is spo.tl (slogan: Shorter, prettier Spotify links), a Spotify-focused URL shortener that not only squishes down the URL to a manageable size, but offers direct links to Facebook and Twitter for easy sharing.
Clicking through to Twitter auto-pastes the artist name and song title (as well as the new URL) in the text box, while Facebook click-throughs generate the album art too, just as with a direct FB share from within Spotify.
You may well have signed up to the Spotify service because of all that sweet, free, streaming music, but now you’re creating a zillion playlists, microblogging your music taste to all, and playing “guess the song” with your cubicle buddies. What else does Spotify offer?
Well, a fair bit more than just music. Comedy is one thing — there’s tons of stand-up material available. Audiobooks are another, with Chris Anderson’s Free the first such title to debut last year. There are also audio travel guides, speeches and podcasts — in fact, a veritable wealth of non-music audio exists on Spotify. However, there is a catch.
At present, there is no way to easily identify non-music content available, not even via a genre search. The only way you will come across such content is by searching by keyword or the artist’s name with the option to click through to “Related Artists” (on the top-right of an artist’s homepage) for more suggestions.
It’s a bit of an omission from Spotify, so we hope that an update will bring such functionality — and soon.
- HOW TO: Get Started With Spotify - HOW TO: Keep Your Facebook Updates Private - HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter and Buzz into Your Gmail - HOW TO: Add Captions To Your YouTube Videos - HOW TO: Create Custom Backgrounds for Twitter, YouTube, & MySpace
Tags: facebook, Guide, how to, music, social media, spotify, tips, tricks, twitter
I'm really looking forward to going to 360|Flex. When I've gone to conferences in the past, I've taken my laptop along, and this conference will be no exception. However, my plan is to only use my laptop during the hands-on session I am signed up for on Sunday. The rest of the time, I'll be "winging it," with only my phone.
There's only one problem with doing that, and that's the fact that I am not yet comfortable enough with the on-screen keyboard on my new Android phone. Clearly, I am not the only person to have this issue, because my phone came with a brochure instructing me to download a bar code reader and a bunch of QR Codes that I could scan for easy access to featured Android apps.
I thought I'd take a page out of their book and post some QR Codes you might want to scan if you're at 360|Flex.
360|Flex:
The 360|Flex Schedule:
If you have an Android and need a PDF Reader to see the schedule:
My notes on the conference as it unfolds:
Note that you can easily scan these off of a computer screen. Happy browsing at 360|Flex!
Quantum cryptography only works if Alice and Bob share their relative positions in advance. Now physicists have worked out how to do it without this information.
The world of cryptography is currently undergoing a quantum revolution. The weird laws of quantum mechanics allow cryptographers to create codes that guarantee perfect secrecy. Until recently, the best cryptographers could aim for was just pretty good secrecy with codes that were always compromised in some way or another. Quantum cryptography, on the other hand, is perfect: theoretically and practically secure.
